An interactive agency serving our customers by helping them leverage technology to grow their business

Jan 26, 2009

Do You Trust Googlebomb Algos?

Can you and your company afford not to take into consideration Goggle’s Googlebomb algorithms? First, for those of you that don’t know what it is, a Googlebomb is when people try to purposely push another website to rank for a search term that they didn’t intend it to rank for. You might ask… “how can this effect me and my site?”. Let’s say that you own a popular restaurant and you do everything “White Hat” with your web site. Your web site has developed over time and you have earned the rankings you wanted, but your cross town competition doesn’t hold the same moral values as you, and so they decide to try and setup some Googlebombs against your web site. They setup a number of different Blogs and forum threads that refer to your restaurant as something derogatory, and next thing you know your web site is ranking for “Worst Italian Restaurant in City”.

Now, I’m not writing this to put a scare into anyone as Google has algorithms in place to filter these Googlebombs. If you would like to read further about these Google algorithms just click the links in this sentence and you will go to Matt Cutts blog where he explains them in depth. What I am curious about is whether or not the algorithms are smart enough to realize if a company or organization is actually assembling a link building campaign or if they are trying to implement a Googlebomb. If it were the case that Google’s algorithm can’t decipher between the two, then it stands to reason that your web site could be penalized for link building or even repeating a targeted keyword term more than 2 or 3 times on your web site.

So what’s the answer? While some people have decided to ignore it and just deal with the repercussions of whatever bad press they may receive from this, others have decided to take action. The answer is “two-part”. The first part is building a Search Engine friendly web site that utilizes White Hat SEO tactics. This entails a number of different things that we will save for other blog posts, but the most important thing to remember is to write content for your visitors and not the Search Engines. By writing for your visitors you will limit the number of times you use your targeted keywords and find other related keywords that complement them also. You can also used these different keywords as alternative navigation within your web site to generate more credibility for yourself. The second part is “patience”. Yes Google has algorithms in place to filter through these Googlebombs, but like everything else in life, it takes time to get it right. If you find that you are a victim of Googlebombing and you have done all the right things to ensure your SERPs, just try patience as it will take time to Google to decipher between the two, but in the end the two algorithms they have in place should catch any persistent problems with derogatory keyword rankings. the catch is that they only run every few months so the key is “Patience”.